As I was getting ready for work this morning, I thought I would warm up by watching some favorite YouTube videos in the living room, via the Wii. Having to scroll down, then zoom in, on every video made me think that YouTube should have more Wii-awareness. So I took out my expedition hat, and found the YouTube customer service form (which, BTW, is available at: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/request.py) I sent this:

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Hi-

I am a casual member of YouTube. I view videos but do not post videos or engage in any of the social aspects of the site. I am also a proud owner of a Nintendo Wii.

My suggestion is that the video detail pages on youtube be upgraded to detect that a Wii browser is being used, and display the YouTube video as a full screen video by default. As it is, I need to scroll down to the video, then zoom in, to get the same effect. It seems to me that anyone using the Wii + YouTube is also doing the same thing.

Some food for thought… optimizing YouTube.com for the Wii would be a great thing for me, and for the other 6mm+ (and growing!) Wii owners worldwide. My friend Chris Finke has a blog post that explains common ways of optimizing for the Wii, in case you are interested:

http://www.efinke.com/2007/02/22/optimizing-your-website-for-the-wii/

Full disclosure: I work for AOL/Netscape as the director of Netscape. This feedback is being sent as a user of YouTube, not on behalf of AOL/Netscape.

Congratulations on your great success at YouTube!

Best,
Tom Drapeau
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I got a pretty impersonal message back: “We appreciate your taking the time to suggest improvements to YouTube. You won’t receive a personal reply to your suggestion, but we’ll use it to improve YouTube.” I wonder if they’ll give it a second thought.